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‘This is not just an aboriginal issue. This is a Canadian issue’

There’s no exact tally, but hundreds of First Nations children disappeared after being taken from their homes to attend residential schools from 1870 to the mid-1990s.

That’s the most startling discovery for Murray Sinclair, the Manitoba judge who is chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission examining the effects of residential schools on First Nations communities.

“Missing children — that is the big surprise for me,” Sinclair said in an interview during a Toronto visit this week. “That such large numbers of children died at the schools. That the information of their deaths was not communicated back to their families.”

Commission staff are still gathering information on how many aboriginal students died while attending, or attempting to escape from, the church-run schools, but the number is believed to be somewhere in the hundreds.

Sinclair and commissioners Chief Wilton Littlechild and Marie Wilson and staff have visited hundreds of communities across Canada affected by residential schools since they began their work in 2009, and they plan to visit hundreds more before their mandate runs out in 2014.

The commission was born from the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement, the largest class-action settlement in Canadian history.

It has the responsibility of honouring the lives of former students and families affected by the schools, educating the public and creating a permanent record.

This week, Sinclair was in Toronto, where he had a Bay St. breakfast meeting with power brokers from universities, the media, business and banking at the National Club.

Sinclair said it’s important for the story of the schools to reach across the country, from our educational system to the corridors of corporate power.

Development in aboriginal communities and treaty settlements have left some communities with multi-million dollar funds, and an interest in better business relations.

“For them to understand and appreciate the client that they’re dealing with, I think they need to understand this history,” Sinclair said.

“This is not just an aboriginal issue. This is a Canadian issue. This is a Canadian problem.”

Sinclair wanted the breakfast group to appreciate the widespread dysfunction that resulted after 150,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit children were taken from their families to attend more than 130 residential schools across Canada from 1870 to 1996.

Siblings were often separated. Native languages, customs and religious ceremonies were forbidden, and parents and relatives were discouraged from visiting.

Sinclair and others in the commission have heard searing stories of sexual and physical abuse from nuns and priests, and how the crowded schools were sometimes rife with fatal diseases like tuberculosis.

The timing of the National Club visit is significant. Saturday is the three-year anniversary of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s apology to First Nations communities for the schools, in which he said the goal of schools was often “to kill the Indian in the child.”

“We now recognize that, in separating children from their families, we undermined the ability of many to adequately parent their own children and sowed the seeds for generations to follow, and we apologize for having done this,” Harper said in his apology.

There are some 80,000 survivors of residential schools still alive in Canada, and their average age is over 65. Sinclair commended Harper’s apology, but said there is plenty of work to be done, which will likely take generations to correct.

Sinclair, Manitoba’s first aboriginal judge, didn’t have to travel outside of his home community on the St. Peter’s reserve near Selkirk, Man., to hear about the ill-effects of the schools.

While he didn’t attend a residential school himself, his aunts, uncles, cousins, father, and plenty of others from St. Peter’s did.

He said he found the National Club breakfast group receptive and wanting to help in healing.

Sinclair said he told them that it took seven generations for things to reach their current state, and they shouldn’t expect a quick fix.

The fact that the meeting was held and positive is a victory in itself, he said.

“Twenty years ago, we never would have had a breakfast like this. Nobody would have come. We wouldn’t have even thought of inviting them.”

“There’s is this view that this was a good project gone bad. It was a bad project form the beginning.”

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